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About 90 km north of Udaipur are the small towns of Ranakpur and Kumbalgarh, each with a fabulous visitor attraction. Towering over Kumbalgarh at 4,000 feet in the Aravalli Hills is the giant stone fort built by Maharana Kumba in the early 1400s. It was only ever taken by an enemy once in its history, and then only for two days. The fort walls stretch for 36 km and enclose 360 temples and 700 cannon bunkers. We climbed in the fierce heat to the top of the fort, a forbidding wind-swept place, and looked out over the equally forbidding parched countryside.
The nearby town of Ranakpur has an incredible Jain temple, also built in the early 1400s. We’ve seen many temples before on our travels but never one more beautiful than this. Carved entirely from milky white marble, the temple has 29 halls supported by 1,444 pillars, each unique. The roofs, walls and pillars are all adorned with intricate, exquisite marble sculptures and carvings.
Along the way we stopped to inspect a simple, ingenious method used to raise water from wells to the surface. A team of two bullocks directed by a man sitting behind walked continuously in a circle, turning a horizontal metal wheel which drove a vertical conveyor of buckets that scooped water from below and delivered it to a sluice at ground level. We passed several of these contraptions during the day, and also roadside village wells where women filled large metal containers with water and put them on their heads for the long, hot walk home. Our own journey was much easier. We had hired a car with driver to take us from Udaipur to Jodhpur via Ranakpur and Kumbalgarh. We set off from Udaipur at 8.30 am and reached Jodhpur as the sun was setting on another baking hot Rajasthani day.
